It is safe to say Niall Breslin has had a varied career, going from professional rugby player to singer-songwriter in an indie pop band (The Blizzards), TV talent coach, classical musician and mental health advocate. And he’s managed to bring the bulk of these talents (okay, perhaps not the rugby bit) together beautifully in Classical Wind Down , his daily show for Radio 3 Unwind.
“The idea came from the fact that people come home after a day at work and they’re putting on serial killer documentaries and then wondering why they can’t sleep,” says Breslin. “Our central nervous systems are exhausted trying to keep up with the world, so I wanted to create something that said ‘You don’t have to watch Jeffrey Dahmer killing people, you can step away from the chaos and just listen to this music’. My job is to create a mood.”
The 45-year-old, best known as Bressie to his followers, hails from County Meath in Ireland (for whom he played Gaelic football before representing Leinster in rugby). His heritage gave him the calming accent needed for a presenting gig that encourages people to nod off.
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“Luckily, I’ve always had a boring voice; I definitely don’t have to work at it. My accent is so flat, I always knew one day it would put people to sleep,” he smiles. “Nobody wants me giving an in-depth, psychological conversation. They just want to feel like they’re in the room with you. I’ve always believed in the power of audio . During Covid, it created a space to say to people ‘Listen, I’m falling apart a little bit here too’.”
Breslin has been on his own long, dark mental health journey, one of panic attacks and severe anxiety that stemmed from his teenage years spent on the Lebanon-Israel border, where his dad was deployed as a UN peacekeeper. He recalls the sound of air raid sirens and being rushed into bomb shelters in the small hours.
“I lived in the Middle East for quite a while and had a pretty traumatic experience there,” he says. “I started having profound panic attacks and was sent from pillar to post to figure out what was wrong, and nobody could tell me. This was the 90s, everyone thought I had asthma. But they got worse and worse and became debilitating. I couldn’t leave the house, I couldn’t go to school. The only way to describe it, really, is you feel like you’re dying, like you’re drowning or choking.”
The attacks carried on into adulthood, and with them came severe anxiety to the point he couldn’t function. Becoming a professional rugby player made matters worse. “When you’re playing you have to put on weight, and I wasn’t eating, I was losing weight,” he explains. “I joke that I must have had about 3,000 wisdom teeth because having them removed was my go-to excuse for why I couldn’t train. I kept making excuses, I just couldn’t do it. I got injured all the time and I think it was just my body going, ‘No, you’re not doing this anymore’.”
Years later, his former coach came on Where Is My Mind? , the hit podcast Breslin hosted until last year. “I asked what he thought was wrong with me and he said they’d all thought I was an alcoholic, and that I didn’t care. It couldn’t have been more the opposite. That taught me something – to always look past people’s behaviours.”
It all came to a head when, having left sport behind and starting his music career, Breslin became a coach on the now-defunct Irish version of The Voice . “I ended up having a panic attack on TV. Live television is live television, it doesn’t wait for anybody, and I had to somehow drag myself out onto the studio floor. I remember thinking, ‘I can’t keep doing this, I have to address it and I have to address it publicly, because this is now happening in front of people. I got help and professional treatment, and ultimately, went back to study to try and understand the human condition,” he says, having since gone on to do an MA and now a PhD in mindfulness-based interventions.
Breslin no longer worries about his panic attacks returning. “I will never let them have that power over me again,” he says. His non-negotiable is proper rest. “And I don’t mean an eight-hour hike day of rest, I mean sitting on your arse eating a tube of Pringles sort of rest. Modern culture convinces us that if we’re resting then we’re not ambitious. Sometimes the most important thing you can learn to do is stop.”
Which is where the radio show comes in. “People talk about meditation and mindfulness, but you don’t have to listen to whale music and burn incense to meditate. It’s about being present, not submerged in what you have to do tomorrow or what you did yesterday. Sometimes just listening to beautiful music is as good as it’ll get.”
The show features everything from Beethoven to Brian Eno. “There’s a lot of ambient music and neoclassical stuff as well, artists I listened to when I was shaken and overwhelmed, like Ólafur Arnalds.” Breslin’s mother is a classical violinist, so he grew up on classical composers – not that that stopped him from cuttin…
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